Pages, engagement, downloads and video

What you will learn #

This chapter is for anyone who already has the Hitsteps tracker installed on a website and wants to answer: which pages perform best, how do visitors engage with them, which files do they download, which outside links do they click, and how far do they watch my videos?

After reading it you will be able to:

• open every report under the Pages menu and the Page Analysis panel;
• read the table columns and charts, and interpret "Hits", "Entry Hits", "Exit Hits", load-time buckets, download counts and video milestones;
• recognise why a report is empty and fix the cause (tracking, date range, link type, video type, plan);
• understand what this feature area stores, who can see it, and which plan gates apply ("live" versus "paid" limits are called out per section);
• find the one-page feature descriptions and FAQ entries for deeper reading.

This is a practical manual chapter, not a marketing page: every claim below was checked against product documentation on 2026-11-08, and the last-check scope is described below.

Before you begin #

• Signed in. These are dashboard pages inside Hitsteps, so you need an account and a site that is already added under My Sites.
• Role. Owner and user accounts with access to the site's reports can open every report in this chapter. Billing, account and team management are not part of this chapter.
• Plan. The page-hit reports (Recent Pageviews, Popular Pages, Top Entry, Top Exit), the Speed meter, Downloads and external-link tracking, and the video reports are part of "Pages reports" and appear on all plans. Page Analysis is a heatmap-based feature and is gated to paid heatmap plans on the current published pricing (see section 8 for the exact table). There is no separate "video tracking" pricing row: it ships with the Pages reports.
• Data already collected. Every report shows data for the selected date range only, and only for traffic that ran the tracker. You need at least one visitor in the range for page data; the Recent Pageviews feed shows only visits from the last few minutes. Download counts need a download click on a recognised file type; video counts need a video the tracker can see.
• A date range. The site's dashboard date selector drives Popular Pages, Speed, Entry/Exit, Downloads and the video reports. Recent Pageviews is a live feed and ignores the date range.

Where to find it #

From the signed-in dashboard (left menu):

Left menu → Pages →
    Recent Pageviews     → /stats/<your-site-id>/pages/recent/
    Popular Pages        → /stats/<your-site-id>/pages/popular/
    Speed                → /stats/<your-site-id>/pages/speed/
    Top Entry Pages      → /stats/<your-site-id>/pages/entry/
    Top Exit Pages       → /stats/<your-site-id>/pages/exit/
    Downloads            → /stats/<your-site-id>/pages/download/
    Downloads Activity   → /stats/<your-site-id>/pages/dactivity/
    Video Activity       → /stats/<your-site-id>/pages/videoactivity/
    Videos               → /stats/<your-site-id>/pages/videos/

Heatmap / click analysis is a separate menu group just below Pages:

Left menu → Heatmap →
    Heatmap              → /stats/<your-site-id>/pages/heatmap/
    Page Analysis        → /stats/<your-site-id>/pages/pageanalysis/
    Settings             → /stats/<your-site-id>/setting/heatmap/

Replace <your-site-id> with the numeric id of your own site; it is visible in the address bar of any dashboard report. Every Pages sub-page keeps the same page heading and the same left sidebar, so you can move between them without going back through the dashboard.

Current-build note (verified live 2026-11-08). On the current build the classic Page Analysis entry (/stats/<sid>/pages/pageanalysis/) redirects into the Experience heatmaps workspace (heatmap.php?sid=<sid>&experience=1). The workspace shows the collection state and limits for your website. Eligible limited-plan heatmap collection is separate from session recording; you do not need to enable recordings to use that path. The full workflow is in the Heatmaps chapter; section 4.10 below explains the entry point and section 8 distinguishes the limits.

Step by step #

Open any report as in section 3. The steps below walk through each one in the order most people use them. "Date range" means the selector at the top right of the dashboard that says something like "Last 7 days"; it is shared by the reports below (all of them except Recent Pageviews).

4.1 Read the Popular Pages report

1. Go to Pages → Popular Pages.
2. Pick the date range you care about.
3. Read the two views: - a pie chart of page shares (each slice is one page's share of the hits in range), and - a ranked list: each row shows the page URL, a page-name link (opens the page in a new tab), the number of Hits (page views) and a proportion bar.
4. Click a page name to open that page; click the detail/magnifier icon on a row to jump to the visitors who viewed that page. (The magnifier is described in the in-report help tip; the list of visitors is a recent visitors list filtered to that URL.)

Expected result: the list is sorted by Hits with the most-viewed page first. If the range has no tracked traffic, the report shows the empty-state message "No popular page data has been found in the current date range."

4.2 Watch recent pageviews live

1. Go to Pages → Recent Pageviews.
2. Leave the page open. The feed refreshes itself (an AJAX poll, roughly every 10 seconds) and the heading carries the small green "(Live)" marker.
3. Each entry is a visitor card: page title/URL, the referrer if one exists, country/device information, and a relative time stamp. Click the detail icon on a card to open that visitor's session detail.

Expected result: within a minute of a real visitor loading a tracked page, a card for that view appears. The feed ignores the date range; it shows what happened in the last few minutes. If nothing has been tracked recently it shows "No pageviews have been tracked recently."

4.3 Check page speed from real visitors

1. Go to Pages → Speed.
2. Select the date range.
3. The report lists pages with their average load time (in milliseconds) and splits every visit's load into one of four buckets: - 0-3 seconds - 3-10 seconds - 10-30 seconds - 30+ seconds
4. Read the row's chart/colour to see which bucket is dominant for that page.

Expected result: pages with no visits in range are absent; pages with visits show their real measured average. This is real-user monitoring: the time is measured in your visitors' browsers over their real internet conditions, not from Hitsteps' servers (the in-report help text says exactly this). Section 6 defines the metric; section 7 has the "slow page" fix list.

4.4 Find your entry pages

1. Go to Pages → Top Entry Pages.
2. The table lists pages with Entry Hits (the number of visits that started on that page, the landing page), ranked.
3. Use the detail icon to see who entered and what they did next; use the page link to open the page.

Expected result: you can see which URLs pull visitors in. Pages that have hits but no entry hits are never the first page of a visit; those visits arrived from elsewhere on your site.

4.5 Find your exit pages

1. Go to Pages → Top Exit Pages.
2. The table lists pages with Exit Hits (the number of visits whose last tracked page was that URL).
3. Use the detail icon to inspect those visits.

Expected result: a ranked list of pages where visitors leave. An exit is not the same as a bounce: a bounce is a single-page visit or a visit that left from the landing page (definition in section 6); exit pages can be reached mid-journey and then be the last page.

4.6 Check downloads

1. Go to Pages → Downloads.
2. Select the date range.
3. The page shows: - a download share chart (a pie of each tracked file's share), and - a ranked file list: file name, its sort-of-type (extension badge), download count and a proportion bar.

Expected result: each row is one downloaded file whose click the tracker classified as a download. What counts as a download is defined strictly (see sections 6 and 7): the click must be on a link whose URL path ends in one of a fixed list of file extensions (PDF, images, documents, archives, audio and video files, and so on). If nothing matched in range you see "No downloads found in the current date range."

4.7 Read download activity as an event feed

1. Go to Pages → Downloads Activity.
2. This is a chronological feed of download events (a pageful of rows per view, with paging), one row per download click: the file, the page the visitor was on, referrer/device info and the time.
3. Use the detail icon on a row to inspect the visitor's session.

Expected result: a "who downloaded what, when" event log in time order, complementing the aggregate counts on the Downloads report. If no download click was tracked in range you see the empty/first-run state for this feature.

4.8 Read the video reports

Two video reports live under Pages.

Video Activity (/pages/videoactivity/):

1. Open Pages → Video Activity.

2. The summary row at the top shows five stat cards:

   • Tracked videos (configured on this site),
   • Video events (all milestones),
   • Starts (manual play + autoplay, with the autoplay count noted),
   • 50% views (as % of starts),
   • Completions (with the completion rate).

3. Below that is the watch journey (Loaded → Started → 50% → Completed) with the rate between stages, a daily pulse chart of events per day, and a recent events table (the last 100 events) with the milestone and time of each.

4. Use the page filter if you only care about videos on one page.

Videos inventory (/pages/videos/):

1. Open Pages → Videos.

2. The inventory table lists each detected video with columns Video, its Page, Loads, Starts, Autoplay, 50%, Completions, Completion rate and Last activity.

3. If you have more than 50 videos, More videos paginates through the library (up to 500 videos shown).

Expected result: videos the tracker can see produce milestone counts; the start column combines manual play and autoplay. If your site has no video, or the video type is not one the tracker auto-detects, you see the empty state and no stat cards fill in.

Privacy guarantee on these screens (product copy, in-screenshot): "Aggregate event data only. Visitor identities are intentionally not displayed." Video reports never show which visitor watched what.

4.9 Which videos are tracked automatically

The tracker recognises three video kinds without extra configuration :

• HTML5 <video> elements, auto-detected on the page, except a video that has both loop and autoplay attributes (it would never reach a meaningful milestone, so it is skipped);
• YouTube embeds, iframes whose source is youtube.com/embed/, youtube.com/v/, youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ or youtube-nocookie.com/v/;
• JW Player, when the page exposes a JW Player instance, the tracker hooks play, half-time and completion events.

It also provides a JavaScript helper (hitsteps.videotrack(...)) so you can log video events for a player the tracker does not auto-detect. Section 7 lists the player types that are not auto-detected and what to do.

4.10 Page Analysis (heatmap workspace)

1. Go to Heatmap → Page Analysis (or open /stats/<your-site-id>/pages/pageanalysis/ directly).
2. On the current build this redirects to the Experience heatmaps workspace (heatmap.php?...&experience=1).
3. Read the website collection status. With limited heatmap access, use the separate heatmap collection setting; matched visits can contribute interactions without being saved as session recordings. Do not turn on session recording simply to collect a heatmap.
4. Choose Create heatmap or Create your first heatmap, as shown. Enter a name, optional description, and the offered page-matching rule. Set a Pageview target within the displayed plan limit.
5. Save the definition if you have website-management permission. Allow matching tracked visits to arrive, then open the heatmap to read clicks and scroll activity. Follow the complete create, collect and read instructions for URL rules and device views.

Expected result: the workspace shows your own collection state, definitions and collected activity, or an access/empty-state message. Recording access and limited heatmap collection are different paths. Experience limits use active heatmaps, pageviews per heatmap and data age; legacy daily-click quotas do not describe this workspace.

4.11 Engagement: bounce, time and attention

Page-level rows in this chapter's reports show counts only (Hits, Entry Hits, Exit Hits, download events, video milestones). The engagement metrics that describe quality live one level deeper:

• Bounce rate is a percentage shown in the dashboard overview and the visitor overview report, not a column in the Pages table.
• Time on page / Time Spent and attention appear per visitor in the visitor cards (Recent Pageviews, Recent Visitors) and in the visitor detail view, not as a per-page column in these tables.
• Scroll depth (how far visitors scroll) is shown in the Experience heatmap's scroll coverage view, which belongs to the Heatmaps chapter.

So the workflow is: read the counts here to find which pages matter, then jump (via the row detail icon) to the visitor view to read how visitors engaged.

Worked example #

You are working on a small store, your-store.example, which runs the Hitsteps tracker on every page. You open Pages → Popular Pages for the last 7 days and see:

What the screen shows: a pie chart where "/" takes the largest slice, and a ranked list where each row also has a proportion bar beside its Hits figure.

You then open:

• Top Entry Pages → "/" and "/products/" lead with Entry Hits: most visits start on the homepage or the category page. This matches paid ads pointing at "/".
• Top Exit Pages → "/checkout/" is high in Exit Hits. Exit is not bounce: some of those visits came from "/products/" and chose to leave at checkout.
• Speed → "/" shows an average of ~2.4 s (mostly in the 0-3 s bucket); "/checkout/" sits in the 3-10 s bucket. Visitor-browser measurement means a slow mobile network shows up here even when server-side tests look fast.
• Downloads → catalog-2026.pdf (124), spring-guide.pdf (37), logo-print.png (9). Photos of products are not in the list: they are <img> tags, not download links, so they never match the download rule.
• Video Activity → one product-page explainer: Loaded 300, Started 190, 50% 96, Completed 41, completion rate ~21.6%. Your YouTube embed is being tracked; your self-hosted .mov behind a click on <a href="x.mov"> would instead appear as a download, not as a video.
• Recent Pageviews → as you watch, one or two new cards appear per minute with the live marker, showing current visitors and the pages they are on.

All numbers above are illustrative "your example site" figures; nothing in this chapter is a real customer record.

Controls and metrics #

Definitions checked 8 November 2026. "Hits" is the product's word for page views ("Page Loads"); on the Pages reports the column is labelled Hits.

Problems and fixes #

1. "No popular page data has been found in the current date range." No Hits for any page in the range. Fixes: (a) confirm the tracker snippet is actually on the pages (view source or use the getting-started verification steps); (b) widen the date range: data exists only for traffic that ran the tracker and is stored for the range selected; (c) check the site's timezone so "today" isn't nearly empty. If it is a brand-new install, traffic must accumulate before counts appear.

2. Recent Pageviews is empty even though the dashboard shows visitors. The feed shows the last few minutes only. Fix: leave the page open and click around your site as a visitor, or wait for real visitors; internal visits from your own IP might be excluded if you enabled "Don't count me".

3. Speed shows no rows / a page is missing. The Speed report needs at least one visited page in range (measurement is per real visit). Fix: get traffic onto the page, then re-check. "30+ s" buckets are normally slow networks or heavy pages, not a broken tracker.

4. A file never appears in Downloads. The click must match the download rule: a link whose URL path ends in one of the tracked extensions (see section 6), with no query string or fragment masquerading as the extension. Fixes: make file links real .pdf/.zip/ .mp3-style URLs; if the file is served through a redirect or a scripted download button, the extension rule does not see it and the download is not counted. Photos as <img> images are never downloads. Links to your own site (internal) are not tracked as external links at all.

5. A video shows zero events. The tracker auto-detects only HTML5 <video> (excluding loop+autoplay), YouTube embeds and JW Player (section 4.9). Fixes: check the video type; if it is another player (e.g. a custom/Vimeo embed or a JS-heavy player), log events yourself with the tracker's videotrack(...) helper (the tracker's JS API is on the tracker integration page, linked in section 9), or switch to a YouTube embed. Also confirm the visitor actually started the video. Loads require the video element/embed to be present in a tracked page.

6. Downloads Activity and Video Activity are empty or show only a tip. These feeds need events in range. Fixes: generate a test download click and a test video play, then re-open. The empty state is expected on a site with no downloadable files or no video.

7. Page Analysis says "Heatmaps: disabled" / redirects to a create form. Classic Page Analysis opens the Experience heatmaps workspace. Check the collection status, current account access and whether a heatmap definition exists. For eligible limited heatmap access, use the separate heatmap collection setting and create a definition that matches the page. You do not need to enable session recording for that path. If the workspace shows an access message, follow it or ask the account owner. See the Heatmaps setup steps and section 8 for the distinction between Experience and legacy limits.

8. You don't see the Pages menu at all / a report is missing. Confirm you are signed in as the account owner or a user with access to that site (a user with restricted permissions may lack some reports), and that the site is selected. If you are looking for engagement quality metrics (bounce/time), remember they are on the dashboard and visitor reports, not as Pages table columns.

Access, privacy and limits #

What is stored. Aggregated counts of page views per page; entry/exit counts; per-download counts (file name, extension, page, time, and the visitor's session so the detail icon works); video milestone events (video id, milestone, title, duration, page, time), aggregate only in the video reports; and per-request load-time measurements for the Speed report.

What is excluded. - Internal link clicks and javascript: links are not sent as link events. - A download is only a link whose URL path matches the tracked-extension rule; images rendered by <img> are not downloads. - Loop+autoplay HTML5 videos are skipped. - Video reports intentionally hide visitor identities ("Aggregate event data only. Visitor identities are intentionally not displayed.").

Plan gates (verified live at /features.php#price on 2026-11-08).

Role. Owner and site users can read these reports; account/billing settings are outside this chapter (see the Account & billing chapter).

Retention. The product keeps history per plan, and segments/funnels note a "history allowance"; the exact per-plan Pages retention period is managed by Privacy and data controls. Check your effective plan limits before relying on a historical range.

Related help #

• Manual hub: /guide/ (the full Hitsteps manual).
• Related manual chapters:
• /guide/dashboard-and-reports/, where bounce rate, online visitors and visitor detail live;
• /guide/heatmaps/, the full heatmap create → collect → read workflow and the distinction between Experience and legacy limits;
• /guide/dashboard-and-reports/ (visitor detail, time spent and attention);
• /guide/actions-goals-funnels/, turning a page or a video milestone into a goal/conversion;
• /guide/segments-and-custom-reports/, slicing page data by segment;
• /guide/privacy-and-data-controls/, retention, consent banner, "Don't count me", opt-out;
• /guide/api-and-connectors/, pulling Pages data out via the Reports API (Pages dataset).
• One-page feature descriptions to link (not copy); all verified 200 on 2026-11-08:
• /features/page-analysis/
• /features/entry-exit-page-reports/
• /features/download-external-link-tracking/
• /features/video-tracking/
• /features/real-user-page-speed-monitoring/
• /features/recent-visitors/ (the visitor cards used by Recent Pageviews)
• Concepts: /what-is-a-website-heatmap/ (only to link).
• Tracker/installation reference: /how-to-track-website-visitors/ (used by the "no data" and "video not detected" fixes in section 7) and the getting-started chapter /guide/getting-started/ for install verification.

• Support path: /support.php FAQ → in-app help tips on each Pages report → contact support from the FAQ page with your site id and the report in question. The in-app help tip on Popular Pages also notes the magnifier icon (jump to the visitors of a page) and the common-problems list in the report itself.

• All guide topics

• Frequently asked questions
• Contact support

Last checked #

Checked 8 November 2026 using product documentation and source, with public pages and safe sample screens where available. Account-specific access, provider controls and effective limits can differ; use the current message shown for your website. Examples are illustrative.